This was awful. Just awful. Moloch had potential. His character is one of the very few supervillains in the Watchmen universe we know anything about. And here we get a rather trite tale of an ugly kid who gets picked on and decides to resort to a life of crime. I hate that kind of narrative, it’s disgustingly straightforward and simple in a setting that was all about complicated characters and motivations. But I HATE the idea that just because you’re ugly and picked on that means you are going to turn out bad. I’ve been picked on before, and while I’m not hideous, I’m not exactly David Tennant (or your choice of accepted male beauty) either. I’ve managed to live my entire life without murdering anyone or robbing a single bank. I don’t think you can convince me that you can become a bad guy from one mean girl (and an over-the-top one at that). And the art? The art just sealed the deal here, choosing to portray Moloch (who in Watchmen had slightly misshapen, pointy ears) into looking like some kind of elf or troll. Look, I understand to expect differences in artist interpretations but you took a realistically exaggerated feature and turned them into a cartoon character. The ears are pretty much a non-issue in Moore’s Watchmen. What made Moloch interesting to me was the man: A sick old guy, far from his prime, who just wanted to live the last of his days quietly but gets wrapped up in this story far bigger than him. Seeing who that man was back in his day? That has a lot of potential. Seeing a weird hobgoblin child resort to murder because a girl toyed with him? That’s just insulting and lame.